Aw Shucks: Damon Lindelof Won’t Be Writing The Sequel To ‘Prometheus’

I enjoyed Prometheus a lot, more than most, but I have no problem admitting that the movie’s script was less than ideal. Well, good news — guess who won’t be back for the forthcoming Prometheus sequel? Hollywood blockbuster generating robot Damon Lindelof! Here’s what Lindelof had to say about his non-involvement…

“Prometheus was a rewrite. Jon Spaihts wrote a script and I rewrote it. And still it was a year of my life that I spent on Prometheus. The idea of building a sequel to it—from the ground up this time—with Ridley is tremendously exciting, but at the same time, I was like, ‘Well that’s probably going to be two years of my life.’ I can’t do what J.J. [Abrams] does. I don’t have the capability. I’m usually very single-minded creatively. I can only be working on one thing at a time.”

Someone needs to update Damon Lindelof’s operating system. Only one task at once? That’s some first-generation iPad s–t. Oh, by the way, all the cool, heady big ideas, backstory about the Engineers and well, most of the plot stuff that actually made sense? That was Jon Spaihts. The annoying way the movie sort of, but neeeever quite connects to Alien? That was Lindelof’s main contribution. So hey, here’s to a coherent Prometheus 2.

The Engineers’ backstory was pretty weak, too. (To paraphrase Red Letter Media, “If we’re genetically identical to the Engineers then why do we share 99% of our DNA with chimpanzees?”)

I was all the more disgusted with Prometheus because it did have some genuinely good things in it. One of those is they way it ended — despite all the gobbledygook that preceded it, I was genuinely interested in the further adventures of the surviving characters. So maybe this could be good.

When the engineer at the beginning broke up his DNA, there’s no telling what parts of it attached to and grew into. This was the genesis of the entire human evolutionary tree. Humans didn’t just spontaneously pop up, they evolved just like in real life.

You wanna really fall in love and feel sorry for Jon Spaihts? And you say you want to hate Damon Lindelof even more? Watch the Bluray extras. One of these guys comes up as pretty cool and humble, one comes of as a huge douchebag.

So his DNA was fragmented, somehow incorporated into the first prokaryotes, mutated over billions of years, and in one lineage it wound up exactly the same as it was at the outset?

Meanwhile, the Engineers waited around for couple billion years, in which time they did not evolve at all, and then came back in time to see the species that had coincidentally evolved to have their exact same genome?